The world’s largest cruise ship was due to sail out of Miami on Tuesday after workers spent two days trying to scrub away all traces of a gastrointestinal virus that had made hundreds of people ill on two earlier voyages. Health experts said the cleaning included any surface that regularly comes into contact with human hands.

The outgoing United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is backing a call for the president of Iran to be charged with inciting genocide because of his speeches advocating the destruction of the state of Israel. Ahmadinejad has repeated his onslaught against Israel at a gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran.

A horse-drawn carriage with a flag-draped coffin rolled through Santiago on Tuesday for a dictatorship’s final and most public caravan of death: it was Augusto Pinochet’s turn to supply the body. Thousands of mourners in bright sunshine bowed their heads in a mass show of grief for Chile’s late leader.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, was on Tuesday trying to fend off accusations of ineptitude and calls for his resignation after he accidentally acknowledged for the first time that Israel had nuclear weapons — after decades in which Israel has stuck to a doctrine of nuclear ambiguity.

Of all the things on the to-do list before the Democrats take control of the United States Congress next month, one item seemed to have escaped the attention of Congressman Silvestro Reyes: read something about the Middle East. Reyes, a Democrat from Texas, was chosen to chair the House intelligence committee.